An intriguing post from Phillip Jensen on the difference between a FUNERAL, which focuses on mourning someone’s death and includes a sermon and a THANKSGIVING SERVICE, which focuses on giving thanks for someone’s life and includes a eulogy. He says we need to keep a place for the funeral.

Great advice in here! I love the little numbered posts on Thom Rainer’s blog. They are like blog junk food, in one way, but they always have good stuff in there. So healthy junk food - like a gourmet burger bar.

When you make one decision in your ministry’s tactics or strategy, you are gaining certain benefits, but also taking on limitations. One of the most frustrating things in leadership is when people’s criticisms are really just the urging to adopt a different (perhaps equally legitimate) set of tactics and strategies that happen to be the ones you haven’t adopted. In this situation, the person rarely owns up to the corresponding weaknesses of their suggestion, and the loss of the strengths of the current option. Steve Kruyger explores this issue:

Once a decision have been made about which approach will be adopted, it’s essential to also make a decision from that point on, not to complain that the benefit of the other scenario isn’t being achieved.

I really like this section of the AFES staff Code of Conduct. I think it captures the right concerns in terms of integrity in evangelistic relationships:

We, as AFES staff, will….

Seek to honour the Lord through an ethical and open approach in our attempts to persuade others to believe the good news about Jesus Christ:

We disavow any approaches which depersonalise people; or that seeks their conversion through manipulative, coercive, or overly emotional means which bypass a person’s critical faculties, or that mask the true nature and demands of Christian conversion.

We believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and affirm the necessity of the proclamation of Christ every person. As evangelists, we will pursue this goal with openness, revealing our identity and purpose, theological positions, and sources of information. We will engage people of other religious persuasions in true dialogue, listening carefully and responding honestly and graciously.

We will especially have care in our evangelistic relationships with international students. We will be diligent in expressing the welcome of the Lord Jesus to people of all ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and we disavow any racism. We also understand that some will come from cultural backgrounds where there is high respect for older people and authority figures, and also where there is a sense of obligation to those who provide some service or friendship. For these reasons, international students must be treated carefully to give full expression to the freedom of their response to the Gospel without any (even unintended) coercion.

All ministry is about making disciples and helping people mature in Christ. Even a cutting edge evangelistic ministry, if successful, ought to work hard at following up and maturing its new converts.

And yet as a focus, I believe campus ministry (or uni ministry or ‘college’ ministry in the US) should have a particular focus on evangelism and leadership development.

Here’s a few ways that focus works out on the leadership development front:

The whole flow of the campus ministry is basically a funnel helping you narrow down the people to really work with to disciple, equip, coach and mentor as Christian leaders. You can’t really ask a group of 17 year old Christians ‘Do you want to be a Christian leader?’ They don’t know how to make cheese on toast, and may not even be Christians at all! So you narrow it down slowly:

Those who commit to your campus group narrows the pool somewhat

Those who further commit to taking on some formal role of leadership or team involvement narrows it down still further

General Leadership Training

Out of this smaller group you focus your attentions in discipleship, training and coaching. What are the general skills and convictions and character you would like to impart to them, by God’s Spirit, so that they are set up well to serve Christ into the future?

Beware of over-training. Training your general leaders in proportion to them putting things into practise. Train them in the basics, don’t just make them passive recipients of training courses. Training them in the context of actual ministry work that is building the ministry on campus, not in theoretical contexts.

(While being in favour of some amount of cold-contact evangelism, I do worry that sometimes the whole process of cold contact evangelism can become quite quite and toxic in campus ministry. We don’t REALLY do it to see people converted, but simply to provide a context to radicalise young Christians and help them articulate and defend the gospel. The problem with this MIGHT be that it creates a perverse vision of what ‘radical’ Christianity looks like, and equips people in an abstract skill: gospel dialogue with strangers).

Full Time Ministry Training

Out of this general group, there will then be those who are uniquely suited to leadership of churches, ministries, missions, church plants.

You choose those who are gifted, godly. But also those with whom you click and those who are actually keen to give more to the mission on campus.

These are the ones you give your most intensive mentoring, training and coaching.

Set an example in your own life - these aren’t just ‘sins’ that kids commit, are they?!

Call them out when you see them. Develop some of those infuriating parental slogans that drill into their heads what is wrong with these ways of responding.

Figure out the opposites and celebrate them when you see them: “Well done for telling us clearly how that you are feeling crabby!”

Deliberately provide a running commentary on your own emotional life, and their emotional life, to help them become more emotionally intelligent: “Can I explain to you what might be going on here?”

Do character studies of TV shows and movies and books - both Franklin and Arthur are character-rich programs that seem deliberately designed to assist with this.

Explore their hurtful behaviour of friends/family/teachers through this grid, where relevant. An upside to this is that it helps kids show sympathy to those who have unfairly hurt them.

Not in the heat of the moment, but in preventative contexts, talk to them about these matters and unpack what is wrong about them.

Explore the personal, practical, ethical and spiritual reasons why these are so bad.

Talk often about God’s sovereignty over all things and build a spirituality that embraces all the ‘givens’ of life: our context, limitations, sufferings, feelings, as gifts/tests from God that can be joyfully received from his hand.

Model prayer when in the midst of the kind of emotional turmoil that sometimes leads to these ‘sins’.

We hear horror stories about evangelical heroes neglecting their families for the sake of their zealous ministry.

I was recently read book notices in an old Reformed Theological Review (Vol 69, April 2010, No. 1) and there was this example, from a biography of C. Stacey Wood (C. Stacey Woods and the Evangelical Rediscovery of the University by A. D. MacLeod - I’m very keen to read this actually):

On a more sombre note, Stacey’s life story, first, reminds us never to put ministry ahead of family, and to enjoy regular rest days and holidays. His inability in this area had long term costs to his family, aside from his own health. The punishing ministry schedule he set himself meant he had long absences from home, just like his father has, and this at a crucial stage in his boys’ development. When he was at home he was often distracted and anxious.

But then on the very next page was this lovely comment in a review of Assist Me To Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley by John R. Tyson:

It is delightful to read of his happy marriage to Sally and his diligent role as a father. Yet this produced strife within Methodism because of the itinerant lifestyle that was expected of him ad which he increasingly felt unwilling and unable to maintain.

I was also intrigued by this little comment:

He must have written one poem or hymn almost every day of his adult life. There are oddly amusing poems on unusual subjects, for example on his pets, as well as heartfelt ones about his wife and children. There are also heartbreaking poems from times when he faced the deaths of some of his children.

If anyone can find and share some of Wesley’s pet poems I would LOVE to read them :-)

I think a philosophy of ministry is a very powerful tool in a ministry. It serves the leaders by helping them make decisions and keep focus. It serves members and potential members by understanding what this ministry is and where it’s going.

A good philosophy of ministry has not only the top-down elements of mission and strategy, but also the bottom-up element of values and culture.

A good philosophy of ministry is a healthy mix of actual values (what we acutally are), aspirational values (what we hope to be) and core values (what we will do or die). So it is a mix of description, ideal and ethics.

And a good philosophy of ministry explains how you are unique in vibe and emphasis.

Another interesting little quote from House of Cards, commenting on Southern American culture:

What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness. And if you can humble yourself before them they will do anything you ask.

On the one hand this is a cynical expose of a certain kind of Christian hypocrisy. Even humility can become poisoned by pride, can’t it?

But on the other hand it is accidentally a lovely observation about how certain Christian values endure in Southern America, isn’t it?